240,000 Miles of Stone Walls Hide in New England Forests

Glaciers Started It All 30,000 Years Ago

Walk through any forest in Massachusetts, Connecticut, or New Hampshire, and you will stumble across a stone wall.

Gray, mossy, and half-buried in leaves, these walls wind through woods where no farm has stood for over a century.

At its peak, the region had an estimated 240,000 miles of these walls, enough to circle the Earth around the equator nearly ten times.

They were built by families who cleared the land, fought a revolution, chased a wool boom, and then walked away. The walls they left behind tell a story that starts with ice sheets and ends with poetry.

Ice Sheets Scattered the Stones

The Laurentide Ice Sheet was the principal glacier covering North America during the last Ice Age, measuring four thousand miles in diameter and two miles thick at its center.

Between about 30,000 and 15,000 years ago, this massive sheet of ice scraped across New England, plucking boulders from bedrock and grinding most of them into sand and clay.

The glacier stripped away the ancient soils, scouring the land down to its bedrock, lifting up billions of stone slabs and scattering them across the region.

When the ice finally melted, it left behind a rocky mess that would take thousands of years to bury.

Early Settlers Found Forests, Not Rocks

When Europeans first arrived in New England, the land was densely forested and covered with a thick layer of topsoil and humus.

Thousands of years of forest growth and decay had buried the glacial stones deep below the surface. Although the first settlers had much to contend with, stoney fields were not one of them.

Wood was everywhere, so colonists built wooden fences to pen animals and mark property lines. Stone walls were rare in these early years.

The rocks were still underground, waiting.

Deforestation Brought the Rocks Back

By the mid-1800s, 75 percent of New England was clear cut. Families burned an average of 35 cords of wood per year just for heat and cooking.

They also needed lumber for houses, barns, and ships.

Without the forest and natural vegetation to hold and replenish the topsoil, the soil eroded and eventually exposed the more stoney glacial soils below.

The rocks that glaciers had buried thousands of years earlier were suddenly back at the surface, and farmers had to deal with them.

Frost Heave Pushed New Rocks Up

Every winter brought a new crop of stones. Frost heaving is an uplifting process that raises stones up through the soil.

Absent a network of trees and roots, deeper subsoil becomes more exposed to the cold, causing a deeper freeze of groundwater. As the ground froze and thawed, it pushed buried rocks toward the surface.

Fields completely cleared in the fall would be littered with a new batch of stones in the spring.

Farmers called them “New England potatoes” because they appeared like magical crops in fields that had been picked clean the year before. Some blamed the devil.

Walls Were Really Just Trash Piles

Farmers did not build these walls for beauty. Most of the walls in New England started as linear landfills, according to Robert Thorson, a geologist at the University of Connecticut who has spent decades studying them.

The easiest place to dump a stone was along a fence line, so that is where they went. The earlier stone walls were more or less refuse piles, or simply the most convenient place to dump excess material.

Farmers used sleds called stone boats to haul rocks from fields to edges. Only later, as farms prospered, did some families stack them into neater walls.

Spanish Sheep Changed Everything

The story of New England’s stone walls starts hundreds of years ago and thousands of miles away, in Spain. Medieval shepherds there had bred Merino sheep, which produced incredibly soft wool.

Spain guarded these animals fiercely for centuries. Then, in 1808, Napoleon Bonaparte invaded, and everything changed.

A diplomat named William Jarvis seized the opportunity. Jarvis, the U. S. consul to Portugal, managed to bring 4,000 sheep to his farm in Vermont.

The wool boom that followed stripped even more forests from New England’s hills.

Sheep Fever Hit Its Peak by 1840

By 1840 there were 1. 7 million sheep in Vermont and 600,000 in New Hampshire, or two sheep for every person in the Granite State. Farmers who had grown wheat and corn switched to raising sheep.

They cut down thousands more acres of forest to create grazing land.

It also is how New England’s landscape became punctuated by 250,000 miles of stone walls, used during that time to corral the sheep.

The walls went up fast during these boom years, built by families racing to cash in on wool prices.

Wool Prices Crashed and Farms Emptied

The bust came just as fast. In a five-year period, from 1835 to 1840, wool prices dropped by more than half, from 57 cents a pound to 25. Years of overgrazing had left the soil depleted.

Competition arrived from the American West, Australia, and Argentina. Many farmers moved away from the region, mostly to the Midwest.

They left behind their stone walls, their cellar holes, and their exhausted fields. The forests grew back, but the walls remained.

Walls Gave Minutemen Cover at Concord

The walls had already played a role in American history before the sheep boom. On April 19, 1775, British troops marched to Concord to seize colonial weapons.

For the next 12 miles, the British were continually ambushed by Minute Men shooting from behind trees, rock walls, and buildings. The stone walls that farmers had built to mark their fields became defensive positions.

Thorson’s favorite historically significant wall is at the Old Manse, a historic home in Concord, Massachusetts. It provided cover for minutemen firing on the British during the Revolutionary War.

Robert Frost Made Walls Famous

Robert Frost lived on a farm in Derry, New Hampshire, from 1900 to 1911. The majority of the poems collected in his first two books were written here.

One of them, “Mending Wall,” captured the annual ritual of neighbors meeting each spring to repair the stone wall between their properties. The poem gave the world the line “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Thorson has been to Derry a number of times and investigated the mending wall.

It turns out the Mending Wall is a combination of two different walls, and Frost wrote the poem from memory while living in England.

100,000 Miles Still Wind Through Woods

Today, about 120,000 miles of the walls remain in the valley and New England, many located within woods that have grown up around them. The forests came back after farmers left, but the stone walls stayed put.

University of Connecticut professor Robert Thorson has estimated it took 40 million days of manual labor, or over 109,000 years’ worth of work, to build them.

Walk any trail in southern New England, and you will cross one. They mark where fields once stood, where sheep once grazed, and where families once lived.

Where to Walk Among Them Today

The Robert Frost Farm in Derry, New Hampshire, is open to the public seasonally. You can walk the poetry trail and see the actual wall that inspired “Mending Wall.”

At Minute Man National Historical Park, the walls along the Battle Road Trail offered cover to colonial farmers firing on beleaguered British soldiers beating a hasty retreat back to Boston on April 19, 1775.

The five-mile trail passes restored 18th-century taverns and farmhouses.

Harvard Forest in Petersham, Massachusetts, encompasses approximately 4,000 acres and includes the Fisher Museum, which features 23 internationally acclaimed dioramas depicting the history of New England woodlands.

Stone walls line its 32 miles of trails.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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